I am a Professor of Computer Science at Harvard. My research is in the theories of computation and communication. I am very interested in understanding the many ways in which communication or computation can go wrong (i.e., have errors), and how to correct all such errors.
My Bulletin Board:
• I am co-teaching Data Structures and Algorithms in Spring 2026. Links to previous courses here.
Madhu Sudan
Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science Harvard John A. Poulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Member of Theory of Computation Group
Some TOC pointers :
Address:
Harvard SEC #3.434,
150 Western Ave,
Boston, MA 02134.
madhu at cs dot harvard dot edu
Research interests
Communication & Computing, Coding theory, Property Testing, Algebra in Computation.
Teaching
I am on sabbatical leave in Fall 2025. Here are courses I’ve taught previously.
Books/Monographs
- Efficient checking of polynomials …, (Ph.D. Thesis)
- Complexity Classification of Boolean Constraint Satisfaction Problems (with Nadia Creignou and Sanjeev Khanna)
- Essential Coding Theory (with Venkatesan Guruswami and Atri Rudra)
Professional activities
- Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science (Founding Editor)
- Theory of Computing (Editor)
- Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (Scientific Committee)
- Starkware (Scientific Advisor)
Students
Current Students
- Prashanth Amireddy (co-advised with Salil Vadhan)
- Cassandra Marcussen
- Aaron (Louie) Putterman (co-advised with Salil Vadhan).
Former Students
- Yevgeniy Dodis (2000)
- Venkatesan Guruswami (2001)
- Eric Lehman (2002)
- Ryan O’Donnell (2003)
- Misha Alekhnovich (2003)
- Prahladh Harsha (2004)
- Adam Smith (2004)
- April Rasala Lehman (2005)
- Sergey Yekhanin (2007)
- Victor Chen (2009)
- Elena Grigorescu (2010)
- Brendan Juba (2010)
- Swastik Kopparty (2010)
- Ben Rossman (2010)
- Shubhangi Saraf (2011)
- Alan Guo (2015)
- Mohammad Bavarian (2017)
- Badih Ghazi (2018)
- Pritish Kamath (2019)
- Preetum Nakkiran (2021)
- Mitali Bafna (2022)
- Santhoshini Velusamy (2023)
- Jenny Kaufmann (2025, primary advisor was Virginia Vassilevska Williams)
Postdocs
- Luca Trevisan (1997)
- Salil Vadhan (1998)
- Lars Engebretsen (2000)
- Eli Ben-Sasson (2001-2003)
- Amir Shpilka (2002)
- Julia Chuzhoy (2004-2006)
- Tali Kaufman (2007-2009)
- Jakob Nordström (2008-2010)
- Elad Haramaty (2016-2017)
- Mrinal Kumar (2017-2018)
- Huacheng Yu (2017-2019)
- Omri Ben-Eliezer (2020-2021)
- Amirbehshad Shahrasbi (2020-2021)
- Sumegha Garg (2020-2022)